Someone made the case that this is an example of unrelenting racism, and I replied that it has more to do with counterculture. Fashion movements tend to call people together in rebellion of current events. The Zoot Suit style originated in the 1920s with black theater, then popularized in the 1930s and 1940s by black dance moves who liked the depleted pants that afforded them greater movement while dancing. Other cultures caught on, but it were blacks who started it.
So the year is 1943, two years into the U.S.'s involvement into WWII, which began in 1941. In 1942, you have the Sleepy Lagoon murder, named for a nearby reservoir in the city of Commerce, the same year the Japanese were extracted from home, business, and neighborhood and forcibly resettled by the government to camps around the western states of the U.S. Like the Germans, the Americans too had their camps. Not to mention the draft that was kidnapping U.S. male citizens, 21 to 36. A lot going on. People's legal status was being rewritten overnight, class status being overturned overnight. A lot of changes and reshuffling in wartime, putting people on edge. Who was to know where the threat started and stopped?
Pachucos, Lincoln Heights Jail. Thanks to OJ Romero.
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